A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russell

  Leto tugs a sheet of tightly folded paper from beneath his cincture. Printed in German and Italian, the ultimatum is blunt. “Five German soldiers were murdered by assassins near the village of Santa Chiara, district of Borgo San Mauro, on 16 September 1944. The killers must be handed over to German authorities, along with the bodies of the fallen German soldiers, by noon 19 September 1944. Failing that, the harshest of reprisals will fall upon Valdottavo. Order issued and signed, Standartenführer Helmut Reinecke.”

  “Reinecke! He used to be von Thadden’s adjutant. Porca bagascia! I don’t suppose I have to say it.”

  “You warned me this would happen. No one is more aware of that than I! Renzo, it was Santino Cicala. Claudia discovered six Germans raping a local girl. Santino killed five. One man got away.”

  “Belandi.” Renzo sighs. “I’d have done the same, but I’d have missed more than one. Cicala must be a hell of a shot.”

  “What should I do now?”

  “Where’s Santino?”

  “I don’t know. These notices are posted everywhere—he’s bound to see one.”

  “You’re assuming he can read well enough to understand them.” Renzo uses both hands to shift his leg. “Go back to the rectory. Telephone Antonia Usodimare. Santino may have gone back to her boardinghouse in Sant’Andrea. The partisans will get the word out, too.”

  Leto’s heart sinks. “Then you believe he must turn himself in.”

  “Belandi, no! That’s exactly what I don’t want.” Renzo gets to his feet. “I know Reinecke, and his C.O. Let me see if I can work something out.” Renzo whistles sharply and waves to a young man loitering nearby. “Find Tullio Goletta for me!” He turns to Leto. “If Santino shows up, send him to the hunchback’s house, understand? He’s to stay there until I tell him different.”

  “If Renzo says he can work something out, he probably can,” Osvaldo Tomitz told Leto last year. “Give that man a handful of snarled fishing line, he’ll knit you a trawler, and there’ll be fish for supper.”

  Leto has begun to agree. Who but Leoni would have imagined getting a truckload of arms and escaped prisoners out of Sant’Andrea? And with the Gestapo’s help, no less! The death of his mother was a terrible thing, of course, but it seems to have sobered him, and Leto feels sure Lidia would have chosen such a death over a useless one, or slow decline.

  A slow decline is just what Leto would like—geologically, if not physically. Downhill is harder on a wooden leg. He makes poor time on gravel tracks, falling when his peg gets wedged between rocks. The sun has set when he finally steps onto the paved road that winds past Tino Marrapodi’s store and downward toward San Mauro.

  There’s only one way back to the rectory from here, and he needs an excuse for being out after dark. He could tell the Germans he was summoned to give Extreme Unction to a dying parishioner, but they might ask the name, check his story. Someone else will be put at risk.

  He’s half-decided to ask Tino for a night’s shelter when an unseen man whispers harshly, “Stop! Don’t move!”

  Leto holds his breath, raises his hands, turns slowly in the direction of the voice. Two figures rush toward him in the lavender dusk: one slender as a willow wand, the other as broad and strong as his own stone walls.

  Lowering his hands, Leto Girotti holds out his arms. The three of them embrace. No one needs to say it: they’ve seen the notices. They all know what’s at stake.

  “Hear my confession,” Santino says.

  Claudia is trembling, but her back is straight. “Then marry us,” she says.

  WAFFEN-SS REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS

  ROCCABARBENA

  18 SEPTEMBER

  “Sir?” Skinny, fidgety, and hardly out of diapers, the motor-pool driver paces next to a dun-colored staff car. “How much longer, do you think?”

  Lounging on a pile of sandbags, Ernst Kunkel rolls his eyes. “Who knows? The Schoolmaster can talk the ears off a rabbit. He and Reinecke are probably playing chess, or some damned thing like that.”

  “He’d better hurry. It’s a seven-hour drive. We’ll lose the light!”

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Meisinger, sir. Hans-Dieter.”

  “What are you, seventeen?”

  “Almost, sir.”

  Christ, Kunkel thinks. Sixteen. He’s still got spots. “You open to some advice, Hans-Dieter Meisinger?” Kunkel shakes a cigarette out of a pack and offers one. “You don’t call sergeants sir, and you don’t tell a Gruppenführer to hurry.”

  The boy lights up awkwardly, coughing on the first drag. He wants to look like he’s smoked before, but mostly he just holds the fag in his hand, trying not to burn his fingers. “My mother didn’t want me to enlist,” he says, as if he’s been waiting to tell somebody since he joined up. “I lied about my age. The Reich needs men, I told her, but really I—I wanted to learn to drive, you know?” The kid’s hands twitch. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

  “Rough?”

  The boy takes a trembly pull on the cigarette, coughs, and looks away.

  Ernst Kunkel has spent the war cleaning Erhardt von Thadden’s uniforms, pouring coffee, kissing up to the old man’s wife. Sure, you can get killed—air raids, pipe bombs, hit-and-run attacks, but what the hell? Sant’Andrea is soft duty in a nice climate. In Kunkel’s opinion, that’s worth a certain amount of diligent boot-licking, especially compared to fighting partisans.

  It’s like chasing ghosts in a graveyard: they know the territory, and you see them only when they decide to show themselves. Over a hundred successful raids, and nearly a thousand Germans killed around here since April. Seven hundred wounded. Almost five hundred Fascist casualties. At least young Meisinger has the brains to worry. Von Thadden’s read the reports, but he seems to think this little jaunt will be an amusing mountain holiday.

  Finally, they hear voices just inside Reinecke’s office. Von Thadden’s new adjutant, Karl Schmidt, leans over to open the door for the Gruppenführer, careful not to step in front of von Thadden as he does so. A cipher, Schmidt is. Dull as his name. Jawohl, Gruppenführer. As you wish, Gruppenführer. Right away, Gruppenführer. You’re a fucking genius, Gruppenführer. Reinecke recommended Schmidt as his own replacement for the job. “He has what it takes, Gruppenführer.” An agile tongue and a taste for shit, Kunkel thought.

  When von Thadden appears, everyone in the vicinity braces to salute. At attention, Kunkel takes a sidelong look at him. Uniform perfectly pressed, already wrinkled. Boots polished, and scuffed. A small coffee stain just beneath his ribbons. Von Thadden thinks being sloppy is endearing. “—a pleasure to see your planning come to fruition, Helmut,” he’s saying. All jovial and generous, like Father Christmas with a riding crop. “The master always likes to see his apprentice do well!”

  Reinecke snaps his fingers at the driver. Young Meisinger salutes and rushes to open a door for von Thadden, then scurries around to the other side of the car. When both officers have settled into the backseat, Kunkel climbs in next to Meisinger, who starts the engine.

  Reinecke comes to von Thadden’s side. “You won’t reconsider, Gruppenführer? Let me assign an escort.”

  “Your concern is noted, Standartenführer, but I will rely on the isolated queen’s pawn.”

  The officers exchange Heil Hitlers. Reinecke raps the fender with his knuckles. Meisinger looks to Kunkel before pulling away. “No escort?”

  Kunkel shrugs and whispers, “That’s the way he likes it, kid. Drive.”

  Roccabarbena is the closest thing to a city up here, but only barely big enough to qualify. Petrol for civilian use is long gone. There’s hardly any traffic. In less than fifteen minutes, they’re out of town and into the neck of the Valdottavo funnel. Mountains rise almost vertically on either side of the river, paralleled by train tracks and the road they’re on.

  Kunkel jerks his head toward riverbed stones barely covered with water, and pitches his voice so only Meisinger can hear. “Trout must be bumping their bal
ls on the bottom.”

  The kid manages a twitch, but the smile never really develops. His knuckles are bloodless on the steering wheel, his eyes darting left, center, right, and back again. “It’s crazy not to have an escort,” he mutters.

  Kunkel agrees, but he also knows when to keep his mouth shut: all the time. Von Thadden’s probably convinced it’s more valorous to go alone, or some old-time crap like that.

  The valley widens. Whenever there’s a good stretch of road, the kid speeds up, working the clutch and gearshift, the wheel and the brakes. Tanks and trucks have beaten the shit out of the pavement. Potholes. Ruts. Lick your lips, and the next jounce could take off half your tongue.

  Kunkel watches the passing countryside, but there’s nothing much to see. Tree stumps and burnt farm buildings for two hundred meters on either side of the riverbed. It’s good bottomland, crops growing further out. Corn, tasseled off. Women bent over, harvesting something. Beans, maybe. Raggedy skirts riding up, scrawny legs showing. Nobody worth getting excited about, although the kid keeps gawping. Maybe he likes ’em skinny—

  Meisinger makes a small whining noise and hauls hard on the wheel. The car careens left and jumps the road, nearly tipping over. For thirty meters, they smash along the shoulder, flattening low weeds and whippy saplings before lurching back onto the pavement.

  Swearing nonstop, Kunkel climbs back into his seat. “Scheisskerl!” Schmidt shouts, helping von Thadden off the floor in the back. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The kid doesn’t even slow down. “Land mine in the road. Sorry, sirs! Did you see that lady stand up and block her ears? She was expecting a bang. If you look back, you can see where the ground was disturbed, and then smoothed over.”

  Still fuming, Schmidt twists in his seat to look behind them. “Yes,” he admits. “Yes, I see it, Gruppenführer. Good work, ah—?”

  “Meisinger, sir,” Kunkel supplies, glancing at the kid with new respect.

  “Meisinger!” von Thadden repeats heartily. “Very alert. There’ll be a commendation for your file!”

  Made bold by praise, Meisinger raises his voice over the noise of a tortured suspension and the diesel engine. “Pardon me, sirs, but we really should turn back and get an escort. Motorcycles. A couple of armored cars. Partisans have attacked two convoys in the past twenty-four hours, and—”

  “Do you play chess, Meisinger?”

  “No, Gruppenführer, I never learned.”

  “If you had,” Schmidt chimes in, “you’d see the potential of the isolated queen’s pawn, which prevails by not attracting attention to an attack.”

  “Make a note, Schmidt,” von Thadden says. “Have those women questioned.”

  An hour passes, and then another, with no additional excitement. The officers in the back spend the time going over some big report, but every time the car approaches a curve where you can’t see the road ahead, Meisinger tenses up.

  It’s hard not to do the same, but hell, Kunkel thinks, you can’t stay scared forever. With the top down, the afternoon sunshine pours onto them like balm, and Kunkel starts to relax . . . His head jerks up when Meisinger pulls onto a gravel track.

  “I need to refill the petrol tank, sirs. And sirs? Up this high, with night coming on, it’ll get cold soon. I can put the top up while you—if you’d like to—”

  Von Thadden saves him. “Yes, thank you, Meisinger. Very thoughtful.”

  Bladders emptied, trousers buttoned, officers and men climb back into the car. The gravel road rises, skirting a hilltop. Kunkel shifts in his seat and looks back the way they’ve come, catching glimpses of the valley through rare gaps in the everlasting goddamned chestnut trees. The view isn’t bad. East-facing slopes in shadow. Sun setting behind them, throwing pretty light on the other side. The river breaking into creeks, like a girl’s braid coming undone.

  Kunkel would feel better if he could see some gun emplacements. Valdottavo’s a lot bigger than he expected. Which means Reinecke’s regiment is stretched thinner than von Thadden thought it would be, sitting behind that fancy desk in Sant’Andrea, talking about fucking chess. Jesus.

  Meisinger downshifts, guns the engine. The emptied jerrican rattles in the back as the car jolts over ruts and rocks, grinding over a crest in an alpine meadow. It’s a giant fruit bowl of a place, tipped west, orchards catching the last bit of daylight. Pear trees, apples. Goats grazing on windfalls. Von Thadden looks up from the reports. “Excellent cheese up here. Not as tasty as German cheese, of course, but good for the type.” He lifts a chin toward the goats. “Fruit for fodder. Sweetens the milk.”

  Knows everything, von Thadden does. “How much longer?” Kunkel asks Meisinger softly.

  “An hour. Maybe more,” Meisinger whispers. “We should’ve left earlier.”

  “—and the local prosciutto crudo is good as well,” von Thadden is telling Schmidt. “Rather like a Schinken, although a different breed of swine.”

  A few hundred meters ahead, a peasant has finished pruning suckers off his apple trees; his big hooked knife leans against a pile of brush. When he spots the car, he pulls a cloth cap off his stubbly head and dodders arthritically into the center of the road, waving his hat at the camouflaged staff car and yelling.

  “Gott,” Meisinger murmurs. “Partisans.”

  “This could be trouble, sir,” Kunkel warns.

  “Not necessarily,” von Thadden replies. “Schmidt, take care of the report. Just as a precaution.”

  A few meters ahead, the peasant mimes with conspicuously empty hands: You can’t go any further. Meisinger hits the gas.

  “Don’t hit him,” von Thadden calls from the backseat. “He’ll damage the radiator. Slow down, Meisinger, that’s an order.”

  Kunkel glances over his shoulder. “Shall I shoot him, Gruppenführer?”

  “In a moment, perhaps.”

  Meisinger gears down to a crawl, swings off road slightly, coming to rest at the side of the road. His eyes are closed, and his lips are moving. Kunkel checks the backseat again. Crumpling the papers von Thadden has been reading, Schmidt stuffs them back into the attaché case. In his patient schoolmaster voice, von Thadden says, “Get out and speak to the man, Kunkel. Give Schmidt some time.”

  Kunkel opens his door. When nothing happens, he stalls, twisting from side to side to stretch his back, and then strolls out to meet the peasant. Bald, bandy-legged, and barrel-chested, the farmer clumps closer, wearing wooden clogs, a filthy faded shirt, and stained corduroy trousers. The old man hesitates, pulls out an ancient handkerchief, sneezes into it. “Ponte nicht gut!” he says in pidgin German, wiping his nose. “You gotta turn back, signore! Bridge no good!”

  “Scheisse! That’s a pain in the balls,” Kunkel says. “Between bandits and bombing, it’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth, going on a picnic these days.”

  The man sneezes into his rag again. “Non capisco, signor Herr.”

  “Signor Herr! Aren’t you the cute one?” Kunkel looks over his shoulder at the Gruppenführer. “He says the bridge is out, sir.” Indistinct in the backseat, von Thadden shakes his head.

  The peasant scratches his crotch and grins uncertainly. “Bridge no good,” he repeats, looking confused but earnest.

  “Ja, klar, I heard you the first time,” Kunkel says affably. Where the hell would a peasant learn even that much German? Again he turns toward von Thadden. “I have reason to believe this gentleman is not being entirely candid with us, sir.”

  Schmidt rolls down his window slightly. Smoke escapes. The peasant’s grin turns wolfish. “Zigaretten? Got cigarettes?” he asks hungrily, inching sideways toward the car. “Für Apfel? Gut, ja? Cigarettes for apples?”

  Unexpectedly, Von Thadden gets out of the car and comes around it quickly, blocking the peasant’s view of Schmidt and the burning papers. Gratifyingly impressed by a general officer’s uniform, the peasant gapes.

  In the next instant, he drops from sight, rolls under the car, shouts something.

>   Firing into the air, a pack of screaming partisans rise from the orchard brush piles, charge the car, disarm Kunkel and von Thadden, thrust gun barrels into the faces of the two men inside. It’s over in ten seconds.

  Rolling from beneath the chassis, the peasant motions with a pistol for Meisinger and Schmidt to come out of the car. Meisinger gets out immediately, hands up, shaking and mumbling. When Schmidt fails to do the same, the peasant gives an order to a skinny young bandit with close-set eyes and huge nose overhanging a rudimentary mustache. “Put that fire out!” the boy shouts in Viennese German. “Do as you’re told or I’ll shoot, Schlappschwanz!”

  “I don’t take orders from Jews,” Schmidt says.

  Bad move, Kunkel thinks, and he’s right. The little kike fires into the backseat and takes a startled step backward. Glowering under a chimpanzee’s brow, a hairy thug pushes the Jew aside, reaches inside the car, and hauls Schmidt’s body onto the road.

  Foamy red blood pulses from the neck. Legs scrabble at the gravelly road. Trousers darken. Feet twitch spasmodically, flop sideways. Wooden matches spill from a cardboard box in the curled and lifeless fingers. Meisinger moans.

  With apelike agility, the hairy one hops into the car, cursing as he beats the flames out with his own hands. The contents of Schmidt’s bottle dribble onto the roadbed. The strong, sweet scent of petrol joins the stench of burnt gunpowder and urine.

  The Ape climbs out of the staff car with a sheaf of charred and smoking papers that go to pieces in the evening breeze. Schmidt died doing his duty, Kunkel thinks. Whatever was in that report, it’s unreadable now.

  The old man presses a pistol barrel into von Thadden’s temple, bringing the smell of cordite close while the general’s arms are bound behind his back. Von Thadden asks, “Do you intend to kill the rest of us as well?”

  Meisinger starts to cry. The bandits snigger. The old man issues a string of orders to his ragged young subordinates. Rat Face listens, nods, and turns to the Germans. “You are our prisoners, Gruppenführer Schlappschwanz. Make trouble, and they’ll shoot your tiny dick off.”